Passionate about IP! Since June 2003 the IPKat weblog has covered copyright, patent, trade mark, info-tech and privacy/confidentiality issues from a mainly UK and European perspective. The team is David Brophy, Birgit Clark, Merpel, Jeremy Phillips, Eleonora Rosati, Darren Smyth, Annsley Merelle Ward and Neil J. Wilkof. You're welcome to read, post comments and participate in our community. You can email the Kats here

For the half-year to 30 June 2015, the IPKat's regular team is supplemented by contributions from guest bloggers Suleman Ali, Tom Ohta and Valentina Torelli.

Regular round-ups of the previous week's blogposts are kindly compiled by Alberto Bellan.

Friday, 20 July 2007

The website of the Court of Justice of the European Communities has lots of useful contact information, but the IPKat has been unable to find the contact details of anyone who is responsible for dealing with complaints. Can anyone tell him who is responsible? The IPKat thinks that if enough of us email the Court every time a decision is posted on the website in one or more languages that do not include English, we should at least be able to make our feelings felt. Helpful information should be posted below or sent to the IPKat here, please.

Right: this is Vassilios Skouris, President of the ECJ. He has such a kindly face and is obviously a great diplomat. Perhaps he can help us get our English translations.

Don't forget the meeting for sole and small IP practitioners next Wednesday (see here for details). It's now known that Mark Jefferiss from the UKIPO is coming along and will be saying something topical about the handling of UK trade mark applications: he's also bringing his ears with him and will listen attentively to any constructive comments.

Left: an okapi, perturbed over the likelihood of confusion between OKAPI and UKIPO ...

Read here in the Telegraph about how four US prisoners tried to escape from prison by copyrighting their names. The IPKat says, this can only happen in the United States. Merpel adds, how the miaouw do you copyright your name? This looks like another journalistic whoopsie based on IP concept confusion.

Right: it seems there were legal bars to this IP scam succeeding

Plagiarism can prove a point quite neatly. Frustrated novelist David Lassman has received wide media coverage, in the UK at least, for his stunt in sending chunks of Jane Austen's novels to publishers and literary agents, changing only the names, to see what their reactions would be. Only one of the eighteen recipients spotted what he'd done - Alex Bowler, assistant editor at Jonathan Cape. But he immediately destroyed his credibility among IP lawyers by writing:

"I suggest you reach for your copy of Pride and Prejudice, which I’d guess lives in close proximity to your typewriter and make sure that your opening pages don’t too closely mimic the book’s opening. After all, there is such a thing as plagiarism and I’d hate for you to get in any kind of trouble with Jane Austen’s estate".

4 comments:

No it isn't! If there was only one second language, you might have had a point - but you can be fluent in a dozen European languages and still find decisions that you can't read on account of your linguistic ineptitude or plain laziness in not picking up yet another working language.

My dear Jeremy... why would English be more important or be better treated than any of the other official languages of the EU? What makes English more important than Spanish, German, French or even Maltese? It's not only a great idea to learn a second (or even third) language, but also to demand translations into all languages of the union! Let's be fair and not egocentrical (or should that be anglocentrical?)